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Ballston Spa, NY; South of the Adirondacks, North of the Catskills and West of The Berkshires and Green Mountains

Posts

6,822

A Green Machine that's not a Kawasaki

A friend from Australia sent me this link. I always like a story that's current.
The original story is here.

Electric Motorcycles: Cool and Green
There's nothing wrong with "cool", and we have to admit that few vehicles are cooler than motorcycles (at least in theory - not all of us would ride one). You're basically sitting on an engine with wheels. Can't get much simpler than that. They're not always practical, but the people who love their bikes really love them.

But cool is not enough. The vast majority of motorcycles are still running on fossil fuels, and that's a problem. As battery technology improves, we're starting to see more electric motorcycles: Some are commercially available, many are DIY custom jobs. Today we look at some of the coolest ones.Electric Motorcycle No Need for Gasoline
Photo: evahakansson.se

The bike in the first photo at the top is Electrocat, and the rider is Eva H?—kansson. We're starting with her because she is a true pioneer in the world of electric motorcycles (she describes herself as a "hardcore 'EV geek' with a green heart and passion for power and speed.").

She has built Electrocat with her father, Sven H?—kansson, and it is probably the first street-legal electric motorcycle in Sweden. It is based on a Cagiva Freccia C12R model year 1990, but the insides are pure electric goodness.

In the picture above you can see the Electrocat's "Thunder Sky litihum-iron-phosphate cells and the original Briggs & Stratton Etek motor". The blue box is the Alltrax AXE7245 controller. Charging takes half an hour on a powerful garage charger (longer with the smaller onboard charger - about 7 hours) and range is 80 km (50 miles) per charge at 70 km/h (44 mph).

50 miles and then a 7 hour charge? So how long would an Iron Butt take? .......let's see, carry the 7.........divided by..........5.3 days. Yeah, keep working on it. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for "Green" products, whether you buy into the man made global warming or not, polution is a bad thing, no way around it. But until somebody comes up with better battery technology, I can't see it being a big seller.

50 miles and then a 7 hour charge? So how long would an Iron Butt take? .......let's see, carry the 7.........divided by..........5.3 days. Yeah, keep working on it. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for "Green" products, whether you buy into the man made global warming or not, polution is a bad thing, no way around it. But until somebody comes up with better battery technology, I can't see it being a big seller.

Hmmmm?

Good, BUT? How much gas, oil, nuclear or coal energy does it take to "charge" that thing everytime?. I wonder how green it really is, when you figure we need to refuel the batteries. Of course I did not mention Solar, wind and water sources, which I should not leave out. Today, we still require all the above for all of our electricty, so keep working at it. I want a 500+ mile range, at the very least and maybe a mini nuclear powered bike will come about someday, with unlimited miles, speed. Cold fusion would be nice to invent! I'm working on it. Randy

Thanks for posting the article Paul. I am glad to see someone is ‘«ˇpurposefully wondering‘«÷ about the internet for bike stories.

The cottage development of alternative motorcycles has centered on electrics for a variety of reasons. The problems have been detailed fairly well here. Hydrogen may find its way into bikes first because of them.

I stumbled across a research article on the development of storage tanks for hydrogen cars. The studies goal was to find lighter metals with the structural integrity to do the job. I am not an engineer or metallurgist so the details were lost on me; however, the research sounded promising. The article suggested the result in application was a storage tank that was substantially lighter than current tanks or a battery pack required to propel a vehicle and offered substantially more range between fills (~80-90% of the range of a similar gas tank of the same size). Sorry, I did not save the link - ?Reuters, MIT Journal or something else?

Hydrogen seems to be beyond the development capabilities of the current cottage motorcycle developers and lacks the ubiquitous infrastructure that gasoline and electric alternatives currently enjoy.

One big problem with hydrogen: at present, there is only one way to get it that does not require a greater input of energy than the hydrogen will yield. That method is to extract it from petroleum. No surprise that the Shrub was so big on hydrogen.

Some friends and I were speculating on what things would look like today if the development of electric power supplies had been further developed when cars started hitting the trail. It is ubiquitous now but limited then and so the early electric cars lost out because gasoline powered cars were easier to feed. Seems we are in the same sort of option/supply paradigm situation now.

One big problem with hydrogen: at present, there is only one way to get it that does not require a greater input of energy than the hydrogen will yield. That method is to extract it from petroleum. No surprise that the Shrub was so big on hydrogen.

Yeah, we would not want to be the wrong shade of "green".

BTW, that whole more energy to produce than it contains problem did not slow ethanol in gasoline down much.

BTW, that whole more energy to produce than it contains problem did not slow ethanol in gasoline down much.

Ethanol wasn't about energy or efficiency- it was about reducng pollution. The sad part is that some science suggests that all it really did is trade one type for another, and that's NOT considering the effects of its own production.

Ethanol wasn't about energy or efficiency- it was about reducng pollution. The sad part is that some science suggests that all it really did is trade one type for another, and that's NOT considering the effects of its own production.

Sorry, but ethanol was "sold" to us on two bases:

1. Promote "energy independence". Kind of hard to do if it takes more energy to make than it contains, but nevermind.

2. Reducing air pollution, primarily ozone. As you correctly point out, that one is not really working out either.

May of the mandates are state based. Ethenol production plants are coop based operations owned by farmers in many cases. In one Minnesota case it was an alternate use for an old brewery that failed because it could not meet emission standards ‘«Ű stopped in its tracks by liberals that lived down wind of it.

Questionable and bad policy can be championed by any philosophy.
As they found out in St. Paul it just stinks

1. Promote "energy independence". Kind of hard to do if it takes more energy to make than it contains, but nevermind.

Fallacy. I'm no fan of ethanol, but if the energy needed to make it comes from local resources instead of imported oil then it helps. I don't know if that is currently the situation. It certainly could be the situation.

If you convert 100 BTUs of local coal, for example, into 80 BTUs of ethanol, that's 80 BTUs of oil that need not be imported. That's good from an energy independence point of view. It may be good or bad from a green point of view depending upon how the conversion is done. I don't know if it is good or bad from an economic point of view, either.